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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Conference ethics - my take on the AIDS talkfest 2014

At any given time there are thousands of
large conferences held all over the globe. Many of these conferences are mere
make-belief, they are set up by conference organisers in hope of extracting
good money from conferences goers in order to make a profit. They are not
infrequently organized by equally dodgy open access outfits in the publishing
industry. I won’t mention names here, but you know who you are.

Then there are other conferences where one
wonders why they still exist in the form and shape in which they are held. A
case in point is the International AIDS Conference. This biennial event was
held in 2014 for the 20th time, this time in Melbourne, Australia.
In the old days the location of this conference was considered to be an
important political decision, as its mere magnitude guaranteed the AIDS
community in the host country a high public profile for their cause. The good
and great would come to address the conference (Bob Geldof and Bill Clinton
offered the necessary glitz in Melbourne) and say nice things about people with
HIV/AIDS and – more recently - the need to provide affordable medicines to
people in developing countries. Well, that was after the advent of
life-preserving medication. Prior to that there was a much more real sense of
urgency, people fought over trial designs and the meaning of however fragile
trial outcomes and unjust discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS. One
conference, held in South Africa, was addressed farcically by an ANC government
representative steeped in deep denial about the role of HIV in AIDS.

Today AIDS is primarily a disease killing
the world’s poor. That’s true for the USA, but really this uncomfortable fact holds
true for the global south. Access to affordable medicines has greatly improved,
but millions who could clinically benefit from HIV medicines have to date no
affordable access. Worse, the economic crisis in the West meant a scaling back
of donor programs, leaving those who managed to access life-preserving
medicines in some instances with unexpectedly having nowhere to turn to due to
program closures. A great deal of managerial incompetence and corruption in
countries in sub-Saharan Africa means that people in need of HIV medicines are
not receiving them. Preventable deaths occur frequently.

Given this background, holding a conference
such as this in Melbourne, Australia, of all places, truly borders on the
absurd. Between 14,000 and 16,000 conference goers flew from all over the world
to attend this latest AIDS talkfest in a rich location where HIV/AIDS, frankly,
affects a fairly small, very well clinically cared for number of people. Much
as I appreciate the joy that must come to North American and European
conference goers from travelling to Down Under, this has been a truly bizarre
location to hold this conference in.

Nothing much was truly achieved by this
giant assault on our environment courtesy of thousands of academics and
activists circumventing the globe to talk to each other in an endless stream of
sessions and meetings. In the age of email and tools such as Skype that could
have been achieved with less environmental destruction.

So, talking about conference ethics (I will
trademark this term!), is it unreasonable to ask of organisers of such
conference to consider only locations where actually large numbers of people
still fight to survive this disease and perhaps give locations a miss where
AIDS has become a manageable chronic condition, and where the civil rights of
HIV infected people are thankfully well protected?

I quietly assumed to this point that much
is served by holding such gigantic meetings at all, alas I am skeptical. After
all, relevant clinical research will be published quickly in relevant journals
these days, the time delay is negligible, researchers will know each other by
means of email or Skype or teleconferences. Activists worth their money would
have figured out ways to let their donor monies go further by not attending
these talkfests and spending the cash instead on actual work aimed at
furthering their objectives.

Guess if travellers in the AIDS business need to
travel - usually on other's dime - at least they ought to travel to places where much work needs to be
done, not to places that are comparably well-off. Perhaps not as nice as
Melbourne, but slightly more justifiable.